


i'll attack without a warning sign (terror lurks in the night)

by moonsandstar_s



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-03-13 15:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3386774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[[you were always left in the shadow and you never wanted to be a child of darkness, but that’s all she ever gave you.</p><p>tw: mention of blood, suicide, & depression. ]] </p><p>///</p><p>I’ll attack without a warning sign (terror lurks in the night)</p><p>.</p><p>I can hear the voices stirring / all the awful things they’re planning / I don’t feel pain / I don’t back down</p><p> </p><p>— bad blood, creature feature</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll attack without a warning sign (terror lurks in the night)

// 

You can’t go a single day without wanting to tear yourself apart, ligament by ligament, plucking until you hear bones snap and see red marrow.

You’ve lived in her shadow— always in her shadow, always striving for the light and falling pitifully short. She is diamond knife— delicate and sly and a perfect crafted weapon. You are a rusted hammer, useless: for crushing the opposition, but Maman wants clever, not brash.

You taste copper: you’re swallowing it every day, choking on nightmares and shrinking in her shadow. You’re trying to do good but you can’t, and God, it sucks.

You remember the time it happened. You had just been a little boy: nineteen. The eighteen hundreds. You had dreams. A wife, kids, a family. Instead, all you got were scars and everything you wanted being torn away and winter breathing down the back of your neck; cursed at ruining everything you touched and destroying anyone you loved. You killed so many, you hollowed out their bodies so they’d feel just as empty as you. You sunk your teeth into their flesh, infecting them with the monster inside of you, and you bled crimson, and drank it too.

But you tell yourself that you don’t care who you were. You are, and only will be, a vampire, a child of the night. You forget how your old mother, a mortal, used tell you stories woven with magic and wonderment. How your father used to come in the middle of the night, of the bleak winters, and take you to watch the stars: to know them all— Pisces, Virgo, Sagittarius. You force yourself to believe that Mother is all that matters. That if it wasn’t for her you would be dead.

You say it so many times you can almost believe it.

// 

And then: Carmilla. Older than you, wiser, aloof. Only— she was Mircalla then, a girl with half the bitterness in her eyes and faded freckles splashed across her nose.

You remember the time you first met her. She had been standing on a tall bluff, overlooking a bleak moor, and Mother was beside her. You were young— nineteen, only, but it felt like everything then, because you would be nineteen forever. You wanted to be the best. You could feel the surge of power in you, licking your veins with fire, until it froze to a bitter resent.

You were drunk on death, and it was sour like the whiskey you spluttered down once. 

She looks at you one day after you kill someone. You feel ashamed, somehow, as she gazes at you, with scarlet on your teeth and down your chest, with her piercing eyes. And she says, “You don’t smile anymore, William.”

You didn’t ask what she meant then, but you think you know now.

// 

One day you ask Carmilla why she hates music so much, and she looks at her hands— they’re littered with countless scars that have healed, but never quite gone away, and you can see the quiet self hatred in her eyes. You think they’re silver, like the stars she likes to look at, the stars she taught you about. Her voice is abated and controlled, unlike you, when she speaks. “People,” she says in that practiced tone that lets you know how old she is, “only want to hear songs with the words they are afraid to say. Like cowards.”

You go out and kill five people that night, and it still doesn’t drive away the rage pulsing in your chest, and their blood chokes you going down as you hear her voice saying like cowards.

// 

Mother beckons you one day. You remember, it’s 1872. You had been in the far north then, with the green gossamer, the holy light of aurora borealis shimmering overhead, with the glitter of snow and the deep, dark forests. Mother always had a wolf’s smile, some dark and cloying animal in her eyes: that same creature that spurred you to kill so many. You’re a child of wolf, and you’re never good enough. 

// 

One time in the eighteen hundreds, she jumps off a building. You find her by a riverbank, ground into the mud, with her eyes full of terrible grief and those scars that have healed but never gone away. Her bones are glinting from torn flesh and she’s broken, in a way you didn’t think she could ever be, because she’s Carmilla and she’s your sister, the strongest.

You pick her up, and she whimpers broken cries into your chest as you carry her home, and watch her skin knit itself back together. You cut open a vein and give her blood and wipe the mud from her face, and you wonder why she wanted to die so bad.

// 

Then Carmilla meets another. A child of light, a child who— inevitably— will die, because she has blood, and not ichor, running red in her veins. She subsides on what you partake in, and you try to tell Carmilla death will take away what she can never get back. She doesn’t listen and you give up, resentful that she’s picking a human instead of sticking with you— her brother, of all people.

There’s almost a sick delight in you when Mother finds out, a delight that makes you loathe to it.

That delight burns into cold resent and bitterness and shock, sour and stinging in your throat, when you see it: Mother forcing Carmilla into a mahogany coffin, Mother taking the human girl and slitting her throat, Mother filling the coffin with the girl’s blood, Mother laughing at Carmilla’s terrified screams, Mother slamming the lid and turning to you with a horrifying smile on her blood-red teeth.

You pause by the coffin as it goes under and you breathe a prayer for Carmilla, a plea to a God you don’t believe in, because that God never helped you. The only one controlling your fate— the only one with your allegiance now— is Mother.

You go back to the house that night, and you punch a wall, and when you cradle your shredded, bleeding knuckles, all you remember is how Carmilla would quietly help you when you were injured.

Even with all the younger vampires in Mother’s council, you’re alone: painfully so, and you find yourself missing Carmilla and loathing yourself for such weakness.

// 

In the nineteen hundreds Mother takes over a place called Silas. There’s blood, so much blood. Metal is permanently ranging the air and cloying in your nose. You become meshed with the mortals, laughing with them, secretly hating them. They’re gullible, and foolish, exchanging their lives for a taste of thrill, to roll a dice, to meet a pretty human. Perhaps it should alarm you that you hate them so when only years ago you wanted to be one of them, but you don’t really have room to question your moralities: your duty is only to take, and not to inquire about Mother’s plans. You are her tool. Nothing more, nothing less.

But then, when Mother is off in Paris, she comes back early. You’re slightly worried— is she hurt?— but when she stalks into the office with a limping girl behind her, skeletal with red-flecked hair, eyes too big and too hateful and sad for such a taut face, you feel like throwing up.

“Carmilla, my diamond girl, you’re back,” she coos, purring like a cat, and you turn and stride from the room and the only thing that keeps you from murdering everyone in the fraternity is the cold voice telling you to bide your time and wait.

Because Carmilla should have been there for you, and she wasn’t, and she chose a mortal over you— her own brother— and she left you to fend for yourself with Mother’s wrath. She took the spotlight and she left you in the shadow and so it’s only right to hate her with every single fucking particle in your being because she’s everything you aren’t.

// 

 

And then, after seventy four years at Silas, it’s 2014, and you can feel a shift in the air— a deep pull in your gut.

When you see the girl at the town hall meeting— she looks so much like the first— and you see Carmilla staring at her with the same look, you feel something break in your chest.

When Mother has to tell her to get back on her duties and you see the rebellious look rise in her face, you want to warn her for some reason. But you’ve been taught to hold your tongue, to never say the things you want, and so you sleep that night, but the shadows haunting your dreams lurk in your eyes when you wake up.

If these walls could talk, you think, touching the peeling paper, they’d have so much to say.

When the girl comes to you and Kirsch, you want to rip out her throat. Instead, you agree to help her to take down her roommate. And when you go in to take Carmilla down, she sees you and something like fire flashes in her eyes before she breaks your collarbone without even flinching, and as you stagger to the floor, all you can think is raw, pure hatred, twisting like some vile creature in your stomach.

When you leave that night, you tell Mother that Carmilla has been captured. She sighs through her nose, eyes narrowing, before she tells you to go and free her.

When you leave her office, you wonder why Carmilla always got the second chances.

You sneak in and laugh derisively when the human girl wakes up.

“Will, you need to run right now!” she says, and you clench your teeth at the panic in her eyes. “I know we didn’t discuss this when we captured her, but… she’s a vampire.”

Only an idiot, you think, would try to protect a stranger in her room at night without asking what he was doing there, and that spurs you to move forward.

“I know,” you say in a soft, deadly voice, “she’s kind of not the only one.”

Carmilla’s eyes burn into the side of your face as the girl— Laura— blinks in shock. You probably shouldn’t enjoy getting her in your grasp so much, but when you face Carmilla, pinning her arms— you see how in love she is with her, and something white hot flashes through you.

“Victims who fight back are so inconvenient,” she sneers, and the coldness in her voice freezes you.

“Laugh it up, kitty,” you snarl back, and her eyes narrow. “I’m sure Mother is going to find in hilarious I had to cut you loose and finish your chores.” You jerk on Laura’s arms and she rises, rage in her eyes, and you refrain from adding, but she would forgive you, because she loves you like she doesn’t love me.

“You are such a momma’s boy,” she says scornfully, and you want to leap over and unleash your anger, then and there, because even she sees how hard you’ve tried to be all Mother wants you to be.

When you snap at Laura’s neck, the love in her eyes shines again and your fangs slide out, and the rage is rising higher and higher, and underneath it is the sting of betrayal. Why, you want to wail, was I never good enough to be your brother?

And when her fist crashes into your face, you hardly feel it before you’re tearing out with pure, crackling fury dictating your thoughts. 

You don’t know exactly when Carmilla switches her allegiance, but you know she must love Laura very much: she loved the other human enough to run, but she loves Laura enough to fight Mother, and you will be ready to meet her.

When Mother makes you sacrifice the only thing reminiscent of a friend you have— his name is Kirsch, and you tell yourself you don’t care about him even though some part of you is screaming that this is wrong— you start to feel doubtful, because you see the raw pain and grief and hopelessness in Carmilla’s eyes when she sees Mother looking out from the face of a girl she loves.

You crush the voice inside and leave.

And when you’re under the Lustig, preparing to kill them all for the greater good— as it always seems to be with Mother— a chaos, a dark clamor, rises unbidden in your mind when you see the Light.

When Laura and two others storm in with a great cry and white ash stakes, you rush forward first, because you are going to kill her for everything she did. Carmilla deserves to suffer for leaving you in shadow, and not the death suffer: the suffering of seeing the one you love die before your eyes.

But then one of them is lunging toward you with an uncharacteristic snarl on her face, white ash in a clenched fist. It all happens quickly after that: there’s red streaking your vision, and lightning in your chest, and someone is screaming.

You’re on the ground. It’s cold, so cold.

“Mother,” you rasp with copper choking your throat. But the mother you want, the one you mean, is the one that whispered stories to you, woven with magic, in a thatched home where your future was defined and your path laid out.

The last thing you see before all is black is a glowing light, hovering above your eyes before it flickers out.


End file.
